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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   2537 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 16, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Anyone watch the Roadster demo last night? As expected, it had some peak Elon cringe moments, but you don't have to be a great MC when you have a flying car.

Possibly the greatest product demo of all time.

Super cool, but I am afraid it'd be the same as with jetpacks - the tech exists for a while now but it's not practically usable outside of flashy demos.

The practical use for it is extreme maneuverability to avoid accidents.

I think once we get the robots driving for us, the accidents will plummet dramatically, to the point where an occasional collision will be reported by the news as a sensational event revealing the dangers of modern technology the wider public is blissfully unaware of. I don't have hard data on hand, but my conviction is the large majority of accidents is caused by someone being stupid on the road.

I think once we get the robots driving for us, the accidents will plummet dramatically,

Me too. Waymo is getting in about 20% as many crashes as humans do. They claim a disproportionate number of the remaining crashes are not-at-fault, but they're a biased source.

There was a story a while ago about a robotaxi hitting a kid outside a school. A more charitable summary would be that its superhuman reflexes saved a jaywalker from more serious injuries. Repeat that same reporting slant a hundred times, and it's hard to get a good picture from the news.

Instead, consider an (obviously flawed) model where all collisions involve two vehicles: one at fault and one not. You can drop your accident rate by 50% by following the rules, and the last 30% would have to be from supererogatory actions like dodging bad drivers. From that, I suspect that an all-Waymo city would be even safer than a Waymo in a mixed-vehicle city.

I follow a dash cam channel on YouTube and, yes, while there are occasional black swan, no-one-could-have-seen-that-coming events, the vast majority of them come down to one or more drivers being inattentive, distracted, or just plain foolish.

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